The present invention relates to the management of telephone call centers and, in particular, to a metric for evaluating the performance of such centers.
Call centers typically receive calls for agents. The agents are the primary resource in this situation. If an agent is not available, the call may be placed in a queue to wait for an agent. Increasingly, the caller is provided with an estimate of the wait time before an agent will become available. If this wait time is inaccurate, particularly if it substantially understates the actual wait time to connection to an agent, the caller is likely to be negatively influenced by the experience.
This problem can be generalized to servers managing primary resources where requests for primary resources by clients are made at a rate in excess of the availability of these resources.
Automatic call directors (ACDs) and their more simple-minded cousins, private branch exchanges, are used to connect callers with agents and other resources (e.g., modems, facsimile machines, voice mail, etc.). The typical ACD connects callers with resources until all resources are in use. At that point, further callers are placed in a hold queue until a resource becomes available. Normally the first in this hold queue will be the first out of the queue (i.e., a first in first out (FIFO) queue). ACDs are typically the backbone of a call center.
Current ACDs are designed to handle callers in the described manner. A caller waits in the queue until a resource is available and is removed from the queue upon being connected to a resource. If the caller is returned to the queue for some reason, the callers will be added to the end of the queue. For example, ACDs manufactured by Lucent, Siemens, and Nortel operate in this manner.
Increasing there are resources that may be thought of as secondary resources, not the reason for the call or request like primary resources, but a resource that the caller may be connected to prior to being connected to the desired primary resource.
Resources that may be classified as secondary resources include voice mail (for voice mail independent of the main call (e.g., expressing an opinion of the calling experience while waiting for the primary resource)); information on demand systems, that provide prerecorded information on topics chosen by the caller while waiting; or non-agent telephones (e.g., calling a particular party on an ancillary matter while waiting for the primary resource).
Another secondary resource is an automatic call back system. These systems take a call on hold, obtain call back information and call back the caller at some future time. Such systems are disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,227,884 and 6,563,921 which are incorporated herein by reference.